| Summary: | This paper presents a detailed analysis of a micromachined thermopile detector featuring high responsivity and a versatile mosaic structure, based on 128 60 µm × 60 µm pixels connected in series and/or in parallel. The mosaic structure is based on the one employed for the thermal sensor known as TMOS, which consists of a CMOS-SOI transistor embedded in a suspended and thermally isolated absorbing membrane, released through microelectro mechanical system (MEMS) post-processing. Two versions of the thermopile detector, featuring different series/parallel connections, are presented and were experimentally characterized. The most performant of the two achieved 2.7 × 10<inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><msup><mrow></mrow><mn>4</mn></msup></semantics></math></inline-formula> V/W responsivity. The thermopile sensors’ performances are compared to that of the TMOS sensor, adopting different configurations, and their application as proximity detectors was verified through measurements.
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